PHOTOGRAPHY REVIEW

PHOTOGRAPHY REVIEW; Art and Courage Forged in a Cauldron of Adversity

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

Published: April 9, 1999

Frank Hurley was 28 in 1914 when he shipped out as a photographer on Sir Ernest Shackleton's expedition to cross Antarctica. Hurley had been to Antarctica already. Three years earlier he had gone with his compatriot Douglas Mawson, the Australian explorer, and the film he made about Mawson's trip was one of the things that got Shackleton interested in having his own trip filmed and photographed.

Shackleton figured that selling rights to Hurley's pictures of the expedition would cover part of his cost. Hurley was an egotist, a roughneck who had come up in the world through hard work, and he was not easy to get along with. But he was nonetheless talented and fearless.

So Shackleton set off with a crew of 27, including Hurley, on Aug. 8, 1914, a week after World War I began, in a 300-ton Norwegian barkentine that he had renamed Endurance, after his family motto, ''By endurance we conquer.''

Nobody had the slightest idea what kind of adventure it would turn out to be.

Shackleton's journey, one of the great epics of global exploration, is recounted through more than 150 of Hurley's color and black-and-white photographs as well as with artifacts and some ingenious video displays in a show called ''The Endurance: Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition,'' starting tomorrow at the American Museum of Natural History.

If it is unbelievable that Hurley's pictures survive at all, it is no less remarkable that so many of them, a large number of which have never been exhibited before, are first-class works of art. Sometimes the wildest and most extreme circumstances bring out the best in a person, and this was clearly the case with Hurley, who would never again be as good a photographer as he was on Shackleton's trip. But then he never again faced anything quite like what they went through.

Shackleton must have been an amazing, charismatic man. Like a character out of Robert Louis Stevenson or H. G. Wells, he was a dreamer, a chaser of quick fortune, a determined optimist, unbelievably steady and indomitable in adversity, an instinctual judge of men, whose total loyalty to him was based on the fact that he stopped at nothing to save them when the going got bad.

And go bad it did, more than once. He had been with Robert F. Scott on a failed trip to the South Pole, then failed to reach it on his own, getting within 100 miles before deciding to turn back to safeguard the lives of his men. That was in 1909. In 1911 Roald Amundsen beat Scott to the pole. So Shackleton proposed the absurd idea of crossing the whole continent by foot, about 1,600 miles from the Weddell Sea to the Ross Sea, simply because that had not been done.

Like Scott he was squarely in the crazy British tradition of Arctic explorers -- impractical, brave, weirdly inured to suffering -- and this helped make him a popular hero and got him knighted, though it's useful to recall that official Britain, including the people who ran the Admiralty, never entirely warmed to him. He was not one of them, as Scott had been. He had grown up in Ireland. He was middle class. Scott had been in the Royal Navy. Shackleton was merchant marine. He was, to them, a schemer, hustling to raise private money for his expeditions. Today he'd be called an entrepreneur.

The Endurance sailed from England to Buenos Aires, then to South Georgia Island, the last inhabited post, east of the Falklands, before entering the uncharted Weddell Sea in early December 1914. Conditions, which are never good there, were unusually bad that year, and heavy pack ice quickly surrounded the boat.

By mid-January, the Endurance had struggled to within 80 miles of Antarctica, but it was being inexorably drawn clockwise by the ice, back away from land, north. Crewmen tried desperately to saw a lead through the thick pack but ultimately were forced to give up.

For the next 10 months their boat was trapped in the floes, like an almond in toffee, one of the crewman said, helplessly drifting in the sea and slowly being crushed, as if in a vise, by millions of tons of pressure. On Oct. 27, 1915, the Endurance finally began to sink. The crew had to abandon ship and camp on the ice. They took what provisions they could. At first Hurley had to leave his film and bulky glass plates behind, but then he convinced Shackleton that they should be saved, if possible, so he dove into the icy water that now filled the ship's darkroom. He retrieved more than 500 plates but ultimately destroyed most because they were simply too heavy to take along. Who knows what was lost.

For five months more Shackleton and his men fought to stay afloat in horrendous weather on unpredictable melting ice that, from time to time, cracked open beneath them. They were two dozen men with only a wafer of frozen water between them and 2,000 fathoms of ocean.

They lived on rations, seals and penguins, which they killed when the animals climbed onto the floe, and on their own sled dogs, which they reluctantly shot. Food was almost the least of their problems. They had to hope by chance to be carried on the current to a spot from which they could launch their three modest lifeboats, which they had salvaged, toward one of the small islands above the Antarctic peninsula. If the ice carried them in the wrong direction or if it didn't open up in time, they would be swept into the ocean void.